Fasteners such as nails and staples are commonly used in projects ranging from crafts to building construction. While manually driving such fasteners into a work piece is effective, a user may quickly become fatigued when involved in projects requiring a large number of fasteners and/or large fasteners. Moreover, proper driving of larger fasteners into a work piece frequently requires more than a single impact from a manual tool.
In response to the shortcomings of manual driving tools, power-assisted devices for driving fasteners into wood and other materials have been developed. Contractors and homeowners commonly use such devices for driving fasteners ranging from brad nails used in small projects to common nails which are used in framing and other construction projects. Compressed air has been traditionally used to provide power for the power-assisted devices. Specifically, a source of compressed air is used to actuate a piston assembly which impacts a nail into the work-piece.
In addition to driving fasteners, however, manual impacting devices are frequently used to move or adjust the position of a work piece prior to fastening the work piece. This practice is particularly common in stick framing where wood may be misaligned for a number of different reasons. In such situations, a user taps or strikes the work piece with a hammer until the work piece is properly aligned. The aligned work piece is then fastened in position. With the onset of pneumatic nailers, manual impacting devices are not always readily available. Accordingly, rather than climbing down from a work site and retrieving a hammer, many users simply use the pneumatic device as a manual impacting device. Since most pneumatic devices include a substantial amount of metal, users generally believe the pneumatic device to be able to withstand the manual impacting forces.
The top of a pneumatic nailer is typically somewhat flat and can be used as a manual impacting tool without exposing the hands of the user to the impact. Thus, users frequently use the top portion of the pneumatic tool housing as an impacting surface. The housing of pneumatic tools, however, is not commonly designed to withstand impacting forces. For example, pneumatic nailers are typically vented through the top of the device. In order to prevent blowing air into the face of the user, a deflector is positioned on the top of the pneumatic nailer to direct the vented air away from the user. The deflector may be mounted to the upper housing of the tool or the deflector may be formed integrally with the device housing.
In either event, the deflector, which is inherently weaker than other parts of the pneumatic nailer housing, is the part of the pneumatic nailer most frequently used as an impacting device. Thus, while repeated impacts can result in damage to various part of the tool and parts of the tool may even break off, the deflector is one of the most frequently damaged components of a pneumatic nailer.
What is needed is a device incorporating an element which can be used to absorb energy from an impact. What is further needed is a device incorporating an element which is simple, reliable, lightweight, and compact. A further need exists for a device that incorporates an energy absorbing element that has a long useful lifetime and that does not require extensive redesign of the device.